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Marginalia

If, as immigrationists often claim, the economy benefits so much from low skill workers, why continue to spend money educating native born Americans? Think of the economic boom to result if we stopped funding high schools and colleges in order to increase the homegrown pool of unskilled labor.

I dream that someday in the far future the lost art of minstrelsy will be revived.

Last time I was in a Las Vegas casino I noticed the hookers were dressed less whorish than the female tourists.

Horse betting isn't gambling, it's pari-mutuel wagering.

Successful betting requires knowledge, intellect, and the ability to evaluate and take risks. One learns that reality is too complex to be reduced to a mechanical system.

It's a gentleman’s sport, of great tradition. When wagering you compete with other bettors, as opposed to passively sitting in the stands unthinkingly adulating various egomaniacal millionaires who play kid's games with balls of some sort.

When a horse wins a race, he (or she) remains dignified. You will not see a race horse doing a ridiculous celebratory dance, like the 'dirty bird' or the 'sprinkler' in the winner's circle.

The brilliant conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote a book on horse betting called 'A Guide to the Classics'.

Comments

I dream that someday in the far future the lost art of minstrelsy will be revived.If you are referring to minstrel shows, they are still performed(unless they have been recently suppressed) by the mixed-race Cape Coloured population in South Africa.

I'd never heard that before, so I did a bit of searching and discovered an interesting article (interesting despite all the usual pee-cee slanders of tradtional minstrelsy) about the Coon Carnival , a South African event featuring whiteface minstrelsy:

“hundreds of revelers from the coloured community of Cape Town—parade by me, wearing ruby-red pants, sunflower-yellow suit-coats and ocean-blue hats. Above their heads, one segment of the parade spins striped parasols; the other marches in formation, blaring trumpets, trombones and clarinets. And some, although very few that I can see, sing through painted faces—lips, noses and foreheads covered over in whiteface….These are the Cape Town Minstrels, and they’re here to stay.

The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, formally known as the “Coon Festival,” has a past of its own…The roots of the festival lie in the intermingling of Muslim slaves, indigenous African groups, European settlers and other peoples from a variety of backgrounds. Freed slaves organized their own traditions of festivals and holidays, and when American minstrels arrived at the Cape in the mid-19th century, the styles and sounds of vaudeville were incorporated into local celebrations. In a major reversal, whiteface replaced blackface, and the slaves mocked their white owners rather then themselves. They named the festival “Coon Carnival”

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